aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Anderson Cooper’s in the Wikipedia closet

LET’S GET HIM OUT!

My blogging was brought to a screeching halt yesterday by reading Kevin Naff’s editorial beef with Wikipedia over an edit to the Anderson Cooper entry. It would have been nice to link to Naff’s piece, watch SNL, and be done with it.

Instead I had to wade through the Cooper entry’s Talk page, and all of its relevant links and sources to conclude on my own that some in editorial and administrative power at Wikipedia are, if not at least subliminally homophobic, seriously tone-deaf when it comes to the gay community and gay issues.

The controversy at hand is the removal of a citation to a Blade editorial authored by Naff in reference to CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s sexual orientation. Its removal was accompanied by this bolded slap at the Blade:

There is no evidence the Washington Blade is a significant, non-trivial, reliable source.

(Incidentally, the article on the paper itself (Washington Blade) will end up being deleted if it doesn’t improve, incidentally, as it doesn’t assert why this newspaper is notable, at all.)

Ouch. The suggestion is that because a publication is a gay publication, it is insignificant and unreliable. As Naff points out in his piece, “The Blade has a rich history in the D.C. community dating to 1969.” Wouldn’t that rank it among the oldest, most definitive, resources on gay issues? And here we have a Wikipedia admin threatening to delete its Wikipedia entry.

Proto is the admin and he compounds his error by reducing a gay “identity” or “orientation” to a sex act. Again and again in the Cooper discussion the reference is to his “sex life.â€Â� And with that we enter into the smear territory. Writes Naff:

[The] Wikipedia editor [Brimba, not Proto] writes, “We have an obligation to make certain that WP is not seen as a vehicle that can be used to “Out” people, or in any other way be used to damage or smear people.”

Let’s just ignore this blatantly homophobic comment. Suggesting that describing someone as gay constitutes a “smear” is a tired old insult.

Then the editor [Proto not Brimba] writes, “The advantage of including such allegations, or in other words the usefulness to the average user of WP, is minimal at best.â€Â�

Again, the use of the word “allegations” - as in criminal - suggests a serious lack of understanding of these issues. This person is clearly not qualified to edit the biography of a gay person.

The editor [Brimba again] adds, “At no point do we have verification from Cooper or any other reliable source that he is in fact gay, only speculation. Speculation is not encyclopedic, nor does it have any room in WP.”

The reality is that without speculation, we wouldn’t know about the sexual orientation of a great many notable people. But times have changed and laws have changed. No one is going to charge Anderson Cooper with sodomy if he comes out. And the point of my original editorial wasn’t so much to “out” anyone, it was to highlight how ridiculous and insulting it is for rich, famous, successful people to refuse to answer “the question.” No straight person denies being straight.

Now I’m a longtime Wikipedia fan; Kevin Naff is definitely not. Naff displays a typically journalistic bias against - and I would suspect a misunderstanding of - the way Wikipedia works. The Talk Page dialogue is a rich back and forth that pretty fairly reflects the debate on the issue in the wider society. For the moment my side is losing. (I wish that were only true on Wikipedia!)

I most definitely believe the Blade is a legitimate news source and the material should be included in the Cooper entry. But I don’t think the answer is to discredit or dismiss Wikipedia. The answer is to engage and win, go in and support NYDCSP:

I am just trying to do my best as an editor to place sourced content from reliable, verifiable third-parties ... I admit the content is critical of Mr Cooper, but this article is pretty devoid of any criticism of him as of now. To me this is unbalanced. I am not going on a fishing trip to find other suitable criticisms to make my point (that pass the “no gay rule")-- I came across this material myself over due course and found it compelling, and well within the rules, and highly relevant. I find the intensity of the two or three folks coming at it with many, many (I believe) flawed citations of WP policy to be very interesting in and of itself. But it hasn’t changed my mind a bit. I also think this is not something that can be solved over two days. It should allow for other editors to at least read if not decide to weigh in on the discussion.

So I will pledge to observe a time-out, if Proto’s compromise can be put up and observed for a week or so, and other editors can weigh in if they want to. Or not. And we come back later. Agreed?

If you’re a Wikipedia editor (I am not) get in there!